Multisite Scaling Strategy

I'm wondering if anyone is willing to provide some input and suggestions, as we're wrestling with some strategy decisions.

We are launching a turnkey hosting system based on WP multisite. There won't be any community features or other interaction among sites. Each user's sites will be individual, much like when someone purchases cPanel hosting.

With this in mind, we're debating three strategies:

1) ONE GIANT MULTISITE

We'd set up a big, scalable multisite installation and let it grow.

Advantages:

- Only updating one set up plugins, themes, etc.
- Only paying for one cPanel and LiteSpeed license, etc.
- Ability to sign all users up under the same domain (for a coherent appearance)

Disadvantages:

- Complex, expensive setup (especially since it will take a while to build a client base)
- All eggs in one basket...if one server goes down or gets hacked, all clients are affected

2) INDIVIDUAL SERVERS

We'd set up individual servers, each hosting a set number of clients (just as we do with cPanel hosting...when one server reaches the set resource level, we just add another server to the cluster).

Advantages:

- Not putting all eggs in one basket...if one server goes down, small percentage of clientele affected
- Modular approach, just like our cPanel hosting
- Ability to offer clients a choice of different geographic server locations

Disadvantages:

- More maintenance required (although possibly offset by not having to maintain complex giant multisite)
- Paying for more cPanel and LiteSpeed licenses, etc. (however we'll use large servers to minimize this)
- Need to update multiple servers when themes and plugins updated (not a terribly big deal)
- Users have to sign up under different domain names depending on server location (not such a big deal as most users will probably map their own domain name to their site)

Sorry to re-open the topic but I would be glad to hear some more feedback too.

I'm working on a similar project. I cannot give you technical arguments as I'm not a professional techie guy. However I'm probably going to chose the first strategy (One giant multisite) for a simple reason: Wordpress.com works like this... Edublogs works like this... and it seems to work :slight_smile:

1) Whereas Edublogs and WordPress.com are communities, with interaction among the blogs (summaries of content on home page, blog directory, etc.), we aren't like that. We'll be selling hosting in a multisite environment, so each client site will be an individual entity that's not connected to the rest...a silo, so to speak. So, this eliminates the need to create one giant "community." In our case, each site stands alone.

2) Although individual servers would require a certain amount of effort to maintain, one giant multisite would also require a huge effort to set up and maintain.

3) As mentioned before, one giant multisite would mean putting all our eggs in one basket. In the event of catastrophic failure, all clients would be down while we get things restored. And restoring a huge system would take much longer than restoring a single server. If we're running smaller, individual servers and one crashes or gets hacked, only a small portion of our clientele is affected.

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